P. B. Cox (essay date 1939)

SOURCE: Cox, P. B. “Charles Harpur and the Early Australian Poets, 1810-1860.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 25, no. 4 (1939): 249-67.

[In the following essay, Cox discusses several of the most significant Australian poets from the first half of the nineteenth century.]

I am privileged this evening to address you on the subject of “Charles Harpur and the Early Australian Poets.” My talk will cover a period of fifty years, and I propose to deal with all the principal poets within these limits. I shall, therefore, traverse the poetical work in New South Wales from the humble beginnings down to the period of which Gordon, Kendall and Brunton...

(The entire section is 6648 words.)

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[In the following excerpt, Green examines the poetic works of Charles Harpur and summarizes the careers of several lesser Australian poets and verse dramatists.]

[Charles] Harpur's poetry cannot quite be said to belong to the literature of exile. He was not, like other Australian poets of his day,1 a transplanted Englishman, but on the way to becoming an Australian, though he had not got very far: he did his best to throw aside the veil that reading, tradition,...

(The entire section is 10042 words.)

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[In the following excerpt, Elliott evaluates Adam Lindsay Gordon as the quintessential poet of the Australian colonial landscape.]

Charles Harpur remained always at heart a topographical romantic. He was gratified with typical and illustrative prospects, even though his object was always a native Australian one, never uneasy in its orientation. His landscapes tend to fit into formal frames. Gordon's might well have followed the same pattern but for a particular limiting factor. His eyesight was defective.1 There is...

[In the following excerpt, Elliott and Mitchell define landscape and politics as the two principal subjects of nineteenth-century Australian poetry.]

Poetry is one of the expressions of the community consciousness; in surveying the poetry of Australia to about 1920 we have kept very much in mind the community which produced it, largely a provincial community. The colonial habit of thought was extraordinarily persistent—traces of it are still evident and not...

Michael Ackland (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Ackland, Michael. “Crosscurrents, Cross-purposes.” In That Shining Band: A Study of Australian Colonial Verse Tradition, pp. 114-33. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994.

[In the following excerpt, Ackland focuses on Henry Kendall's verse of the 1860s in which the poet thematically recast many of the works of his mentor, Charles Harpur, while offering a deeply pessimistic outlook on matters of faith in his writing.]

Charles Harpur died in June 1868, a bitterly disappointed man, with his meticulously revised poems still awaiting publication, though his work had not been without local admirers. Nicol Stenhouse had given it his discerning...